Who Do You Think You Are? Encyclopedia of Genealogy (69 page)

Dublin 4

The Adoption Board holds a file on each adoption effected in the Republic of Ireland since 1953 and its website gives further information about its services at www.adoptionboard.ie. This is unlikely to be your last port of call, but the Adoption Board should hopefully be able to give you contact details for other organizations and agencies involved in the adoption process.

Some children born in the Republic of Ireland were sent for adoption in England or the United States, particularly before the 1952 Adoption Act. The General Register Office for the Republic of Ireland will hold the original birth certificate, but the country of adoption should hold any other paperwork regarding the adoption.

‘Informal adoptions will be more challenging to research.'

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The British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) has useful information on its website for birth relatives wishing to find out more about an adoption that took place in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. They have experts on all areas of adoption and fostering and may be able to help you establish the records available for researching a UK adoption, depending on your relationship with the adopted child. The BAAF website at www.baaf.org.uk has contact addresses and telephone numbers for their numerous offices in central, northern and southern England, Cardiff, Rhyl, Edinburgh and Belfast.

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The Adopted People's Association (APA) is a similar organization established for those who want to find out more about Irish adoptions and for adopted people who have Irish roots. The APA actively encourages research into adoptions and may be able to help you locate the records you are looking for. More information can be found on their website at www.adoptionireland.com, or you can contact them by telephone on +353 (0)1 679 0011 or by writing to

The Adopted People's Association Ltd.
14 Exchequer Street
Dublin 2

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If you were adopted and would like to try to contact your birth parents, or if you are the birth relative of a person who was adopted and would like to try to get in touch with them, you can join the Adoption Contact Register. The aim of the register is to match up the details of registered members, and so you will only be able to find your birth parents for example if they have also joined the register in an attempt to find you. Information about how to join the Adoption Contact Register for England and Wales can be found at www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/adoptions/adoptioncontactregister and for Northern Ireland there is information on the GRO website at www.groni.gov.uk/adoption.htm, or alternatively write to the relevant GRO for more information. Birthlink control the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland and information about this can be found at www.birthlink.org.uk/adoption_contact_register.htm. The Irish Adoption Contact Register is administered by the Adopted People's Association and is free to use either online or by post. The database includes people who were adopted abroad but are looking for birth relatives in Ireland. The APA Irish Adoption Contact Register can be found at www.adoptionireland.com/register/index.html, but there is another contact register recently set up by the Irish Adoption Board known as the National Adoption Contact Preference Register (NACPR), information about which can be found at www.adoptionboard.ie/preferenceRegister/index.php. If you are seeking information about an adopted or birth relative with links to Ireland then it is worth joining both registers.

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There is an online contact register that has been running since 2004 at www.ukbirth-adoptionregister.com, which you can join for £10 by entering as much information as you know about the person you are searching for. You can search the database of members and email the organization if you think you have found a match for your relative. The UK Birth Adoption Register will then check that the information you have submitted corresponds with the data they have about the other member and will advise you how to go about contacting that person. The Adoption Contact Registers are a safer way of contacting adopted and birth relatives than tracing them using other means because you know that if their details are registered then they are presumably happy to be contacted and talk about the past. If they are not happy to be contacted then this information will be on their registration form.

Informal adoptions that took place before the Adoption Acts introduced from the late 1920s will be more challenging to research. Court records can sometimes prove fruitful as the adoptive parents had no legal right to guardianship and from the late nineteenth century the birth mother was favoured for custody of the child even if the child had spent most of its life in the care of another family. Some mothers fought to retrieve their children through the courts from adoptive parents and if there was a dispute between the adoptive parents and the natural parents a record of this is likely to have appeared in the local newspaper. Unfortunately tracking down such evidence is not easy if you do not have a date to work with and newspapers for the area in question have not been indexed. Most of us will have to rely on circumstantial evidence extracted from census returns and birth and marriage certificates.

There is more hope for those researching foundling children taken in by a home or adoptions arranged by a charitable organization. The
Thomas Coram Foundation still holds admission registers for children admitted to the Foundling Hospital from 1794. You can enquire about these by phoning 020 7520 0300, or by writing to

40 Brunswick Square

London WC1N 1AZ

although access is restricted and a fee will be charged. The majority of records in the Foundling Hospital Archive can be found at the London Metropolitan Archives, whose collections can be searched using the Access to Archives database. The LMA has produced a leaflet to help genealogists, entitled ‘Finding Your Foundling', and its records include petitions from parents for the admission of their children, apprenticeship registers, and tokens of affection left by mothers with their children.

Suggestions for further reading:

•  My Ancestor Was a Bastard
by Ruth Paley (Society of Genealogists Enterprises Ltd, 2004)

•  Illegitimacy in Britain 1700–1920
by Samantha Williams, Thomas Nutt and Alysa Levene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

•  Illegitimacy
by Eve McLaughlin (McLaughlin Guides, 1995)

•  Illegitimacy, Sex and Society: Northeast Scotland, 1750–1900
by Andrew Blaikie (Clarendon Press, 1994)

•  Where to Find Adoption Records: a guide for counsellors, adopted people and birth relatives
by Georgina Stafford (British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering, 2001)

•  Tracing the Natural Parents of Adopted Persons in England and Wales
by Colin D. Rogers (Federation of Family History Societies, 1992)

•  Search Guide for Adopted People in Scotland
by Birthlink Adoption Counselling Centre (Stationery Office Books, 1997)

The National Archives holds duplicates of baptism and burial registers for the Foundling Hospital in series RG 4, though the Thomas Coram Foundation is the only place where you can find details of parentage. If you believe your ancestor was a pupil at the Foundling Hospital then you may be interested in visiting the Foundling Museum at Brunswick Square, next to the original site of the hospital demolished in 1926.

Detailed records of children taken in by Barnardo's homes, including an extensive photographic archive of the children cared for, are held at Liverpool University but can only be searched by staff if a postal application is sent to

The After-Care Department

Barnardo's

Tanners Lane

Barkingside

Ilford

Essex IG6 1QG

detailing as much information as you know about the child. Telephone the Head Office in Barkingside on 020 8550 8822 to find out more.

Another of the great taboo areas surrounding family life concerns the break-up of a relationship, even more so in the days when marriage was sacrosanct and ‘'til death do us part' was taken literally. Many couples simply moved apart and started afresh, even though bigamy was, indeed is, illegal. Despite their best attempts to keep these relationships secret, there are clues you can follow to check up on a suspicious partnership, and this chapter describes how to spot the telltale signs and where to look for more information.

Divorce as we know it today did not become common practice until the mid-twentieth century, although in England, Wales and Scotland civil divorce was possible from the 1800s. There was a stigma attached to separation and divorce that deterred people from leaving an unhappy marriage. Women, particularly from the upper and middle classes, were discouraged from leaving their husbands because they would lose custody of their children, be worse off financially and their prospects of remarriage were less hopeful than if they waited until widowhood. Equally, the lower classes simply couldn't afford to pay for the legal proceedings of a divorce. Before legal aid and changes in the law made divorce widely available to everyone it was very wealthy men alone who could afford to seek a separation through the courts, and indeed did so to protect their financial assets against their estranged spouse.

You might have been told that one of your ancestors divorced or separated from their spouse but you cannot find a record of any legal proceedings. There were many alternatives to divorce that plenty of people resorted to. A private separation could be agreed, and desertion was relatively commonplace. However, these alternative options did not allow either partner to
legally
marry again, though that is not to say everybody abided by the law.

‘
There were many alternatives to divorce that people resorted to
.'

Common law and local custom allowed for peculiar matrimonial practices, particularly among close-knit communities. For example, on market day prearranged wife sales were sometimes held whereby a husband who wanted to separate from his wife could sell her off to the highest bidder. The wife was usually in collusion with the husband and had chosen a suitor who may have settled on a price with her husband prior to the public auction. The sale was a symbolic ritual to make the matrimonial separation known to the community, with the transfer of person, property and responsibility from one man to another. Wife sales were not recognized in law but a wronged husband believed the public nature of the sale would protect him from any liability for his wife's debts in the future and his wife's lover believed he would be protected against any suit against him for adultery.

Reports of wife sales can be found in local newspapers and records of quarter sessions and church court proceedings at local record offices. In the mid-eighteenth century the gentry became rather appalled by this custom of lower-class folk and so it gradually died out, though Samuel P. Menefee has located records of wife sales as late as 1900, described in his book
Wives for Sale: An Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce.

Desertion of one's spouse was more commonplace among the poorer classes who did not have any property to squabble over. A deserted wife and her children would often become dependent on parish relief and applications by deserted wives for poor relief can be found among quarter session records kept at the local county record office. Once a spouse had been missing for seven years the parish church might allow the deserted husband or wife to remarry on the supposition that their first spouse was dead. A married man or woman who deserted their spouse was not legally free to marry again, but if they fled to a faraway parish where nobody knew their history it was easy enough to commit bigamy. The number of charges brought to court for bigamy was probably far fewer than the number of bigamous marriages that actually took place. Researching an informal separation will be practically impossible, but circumstantial evidence proving bigamy can shed light on how a first marriage ended.

Records exist of applications for separation and divorce in the ecclesiastical courts, civil courts, parliamentary records and Probate, Marriage and General Register Offices, though the location and detail of these papers will depend on when your ancestor divorced and may require some prior knowledge of the type of divorce they obtained. Searching for the records of separations and divorces granted in ecclesiastical courts before civil divorce became legal can be complicated and time-consuming. Indexes are available for civil divorces, the earliest of which date back to 1830 in Scotland, though complete records of the court case do not always survive.

England was the only Protestant European country not to have some form of divorce law in place by the end of the sixteenth century. In fact the first legal change in divorce law was not introduced until 1858 and divorce did not become common practice until the mid-twentieth century as attitudes slowly changed.

Before the mid-sixteenth century, the only way a couple could separate and remarry was for the Pope to declare a marriage ‘null and void' by granting an annulment. This in effect was a declaration that the marriage had never taken place. Henry VIII paved the way for divorce in England by instigating the English Reformation after Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. The establishment of the Church of England in 1534 gave the English monarch supreme rule over the English Church, allowing Henry to grant himself an annulment from his estranged wife. Unfortunately for most of our ancestors this was not a luxury they could afford, and so many either stuck it out in unhappy marriages or deserted their spouse in search of a happier life.

Divorce in its truest sense, whereby both partners were free to remarry, could be granted by an Act of Parliament. However, this was rare and expensive to pursue, with only around 300 such divorces being granted between 1670 and 1858. Moreover, if a wife sought a divorce she needed to prove both adultery and life-threatening cruelty (or incest) on the part of her husband, resulting in only four female petitioners successfully obtaining divorce by Act of Parliament. A husband only had to prove adultery on the part of his wife, and it was more common for a husband to petition for a divorce on the grounds of
his wife's adultery in an attempt to protect his property from being inherited by any illegitimate offspring she might produce.